And This Guy My Brother’s Friend Knows Swam to Cambodia

Paragraph opened Sept. 12 in a three-story building on West 14th Street near Union Square, a few months after its founders graduated from the New School with master of fine arts degrees in creative writing. On their second day of business, they met with a screenwriter from Los Angeles, Jay Gibson, who plans to open a room of his own, the Writers Junction, early next year near Venice Beach, Calif. He had come to New York to see how writers’ spaces were run. “There’s a huge population of creative people in Los Angeles who need a place to go – primarily screenwriters,” he said. “A friend of mine once stood outside a supermarket with a microphone and asked people as they came out, ‘How’s your screenplay going?’ And everyone invariably said: ‘No way! How did you know I was writing a screenplay?’ “

Is your friend Spalding Gray? Because he told the same story in Monster in a Box.
—Matt Haber